Chilean Adoption Laws Modified

“After more than 12 years without alteration, plans for new changes to Chilean adoption laws were announced Thursday by Justice Minister Patricia Pérez.

The alterations to the law have would make the process work more fluidly – lowering wait times for both domestic and international adoptions.

Pérez said that she hoped the new changes would bring these periods down to a year or a year and a half, noting that many children awaiting adoptions face two or three times longer trapped in the process.

“The main idea of this process is to streamline the procedure so that orphaned boys and girls have the right to live with a family,” Perez said in a press release.

The search for the adoptees’ biological parents will be placed under more strict deadlines, Paula Arroyave, program director at Fundación San Jose para la Adopción, told The Santiago Times. The process before, she said, could take up to eight years. Children who have been in an institution for more than six months will now be able to be petitioned for much more easily.

Grandparents would also no longer have to apply for adoption of their grandchildren, instead being granted parental rights immediately after those of parents are no longer viable.

Married couples would have priority over single Chileans and foreigners in the adoption process.

Adoptions in Chile had grown steadily over the last seven years according to data released by the Justice Ministry – by nearly 140 percent since 2006 – although they failed to grow for the first time in 2012 since at least 2006, dropping by 8 percent from the previous year. ”

Adoption update hopes to ease orphaned Chileans path to parents

[Santiago Times 6/28/13 by Zachary F. Volkert]

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